


pry the door from its post, i've been hiding out for days and nothing's growing

by Buttercup_ghost



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, F/F, Flashbacks, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Introspection, Medicine, Memory Alteration, New Dangan Ronpa V3 Spoilers, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Spoilers, Transphobia, Watch me throw shade at the first dr game, just a hint dw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-01-31 11:18:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12680814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buttercup_ghost/pseuds/Buttercup_ghost
Summary: Meet me in the blue bed, I'll be drying out your flawsAnd clawing out to cause my knees to trembleMeet me in the back shed, I'll be hanging up the knivesHumming melodies that rhyme, building castles out of shovels





	pry the door from its post, i've been hiding out for days and nothing's growing

I.

Maki swallows down ash like pills, chalk to solid stuck in her throat. Her drink is coffee, never tea, to bitter. She refuses to put sugar in it, though, refuses to drink anything else in the mornings but the black watered down fluid. She hates the bitterness, but every morning like clockwork, she drinks it down.

Its better than water, in her opinion, the taste of minerals sticking to her tongue, the urge to vomit. She doesn't know if her water has more elements than in other places, or if she's just more sensitive to it. She doesn't know anything about herself. 

Maybe she's just making her coffee wrong.

She puts down her cup. She still has some coffee left, her pills, though seemingly endless, were finite. Her head hurt, and she sighed. She could still feel them in her throat, fighting their way up along with nausea. She wonders when the pain killers will kick in, if they ever make it down. Wonders if whatever meds her appointed psychiatrist gave her will make her feel right. She doesn't think they ever will, she doesn't trust her psychiatrist as far as she can through them, which is, apparently, not as far as she thought. She's not the ultimate assassin, after all. She never was.

Sometimes, she found herself reminding herself of that. She isn't a killer. She has never gone to a convention, never held a katana, never botched a mission. She had never picked up another weapon, any other weapon, had never taken shots at people in the dark or had to endure strength training, no matter what her brain is telling her.

She wasn't an assassin. She wasn't a killer.

She wonders what she was then, if not that. She wonders what even matters in this haze, if her fiction is meaningless and her feelings fake. She hates that she wonders this. 

She wonders if Kaede was right, all along.

The feeling of cherishing someone is something that everyone had, she had said. 

Did she cherish kaito?

She doesn't know. She doesn't know what was fiction and what was not, what fabricated for entertainment and what actually came from her heart. She doesn't know if it matters.

She doesn't know what was in the script and not, and it scares her. 

She remembers Kaede, a lot. She doesn't know why. Maybe, because before even kaito, or saihara, she was there. She spent time with her, and smiled at her. 

She even said she'd play piano for her and the orphanage.

It didn't matter anymore. The orphanage didn't even exist, for all maki knew. And if it did, it wasn't like her memory of it. Kaede was dead and gone, her belief and drive to get out becoming her downfall, in the end. It shouldn't matter anymore.

But it did to her. 

She doesn't think she loved kaito. She doesn't think she knew what love was, back then. She was still shackled by the chains of the script, a puppet on strings, just saying whatever sells. 

Maybe saihara was the same with Kaede.

Its an unpleasant thought, but it doesn't feel incorrect. Everything about this situation was unpleasant.

Saihara says to trust in her feelings, to believe. She doesn't know if she can, though. She doesn't know what her feelings are. She thinks saihara misses him more than she does.

She misses Kaede.

She doesn't know why. She shouldn't be the one torn up about her, and she shouldn't be the one she misses.

Kaito feels like a hazy fever dream. Kaede feels like a ghost.

She wonders if the script ever had her and Kaedes names together.

Her coffee is cold.

 

II.

Maki has a plush pumpkin, halfway a pillow, halfway a stuffed toy. It's a Halloween one, a jack o lantern that she pulled from a bargain bin, fifty cents. Maki thinks at the time it was a few weeks after Halloween, time bluring a bit in her mind. She wonders if Kaede would have liked it, but pushes the thought away.

Technially, it was himikos, the mage buying it on impulse, giving maki and saihara puppy eyes until they gave it, only for her to get bored of a week later. It had somehow managed to find itself in her possession, after that.

She supposed it made some degree of sense. While the himiko has the complete bed, frame and all, saihara and her only have mattresses on the floor, and out of the two of them only one of them had a full pillow. So maki was stuck with a pumpkin plushie, in the end.

It was oddly fitting, in a way. Her cover talent had been caretaking after all, even if that was a lie to cover up yet another lie. 

The pumpkin wasn't that big, in all honesty, just large enough to wrap her arms around, and hold it close to her chest. She founded herself curling in around it, sometimes. 

It was comforting. It was almost warm, like Kaede. Kaito was warm too, of course, but he was energetic and loud, too. Unlike him, while Kaede was still those things, she knew how to real it in. Her presence was gentler, no abrasive edges or hard points for her to get cut on.

Maki buried her face into the orange thing, as if trying to breath in a scent that was never there. She doesn't really know what kaede smelt like, but she tries to imagine it anyways, almost subconsciously. The pillow was soft.

The dreams of executions full of pianos and stardusts are replaced with her smile, her hand in hers.

Soon, she fell asleep like this every night, wondering if this was what perfect world looked like.

And everytime the morning comes, light waking her up from her slumber, reality coming down, shattering the dream she was tightly embracing, she almost feels bitter.

Sometimes she wishes she didn't wake up.

 

III.

Saihara plays her music. It turns out she really was a pianist—one of the only one of them who wasn't all a lie, and she died—though she fumbled some keys, notes not quite perfect. She wasn't the ultimate one, but she was one. She was beautiful.

She hated it. She hated her songs, the off time notes that just made her more endearing, her melancholy smile as she played. She could hear her words with each note, a hopeless gleam in her closed eyes.

_"I'm perfect for a killing game, I have no faith in humanity."_

She hated it. She hated it so much. It wasn't her, yet it was. It was more her than she ever seen her. She doesn't know—her emotions are scrambled. This wasn't her Kaede, this wasn't the one she knew. She wonders if it's the most honest she's seen her, the truest.

She wishes her thoughts would shut up.

Clair de luna was her least favorite song, she said, in an interview.

Whenever maki hears piano music she leaves the room, trying not to puke.

 

IV.

Saihara won't let her use knifes. It's annoying, tedious, how she relied on others to make her food, whenever the recipe requires a knife, but she doesn't complain. She can't find it in her, when she knows he's right.

Whenever she holds a knife she's back there, slashing on the panel, desperate to get in, to save him, to the point she can't even think, only act. Sometimes, she's back on missions to kill that she never really went on, or maybe she's back to right before he was executed, her moving to protect him just like her character said to, just like she never did for Kaede.

Last time she held a knife, when she came to, her arms were bleeding.

 

V.

Maki hates the letter V more than she hates herself—and she hates herself a lot.

She locks herself in the bathroom, at night, a laptop in her lap as she sits on the floor. If anyone was awake, and asked, she had just woken up and had to go. In reality she didn't sleep, though—not until the clock chimed three in the morning and she could hardly open her tear laced eye lashes.

She watched danganronpa. 

She wanted to know why. Why they had to die, what the appeal was at all. 

The game wasn't even that good, if she's honest. The first case was tragic, a strong start that left her feeling hallow—but the main character seemed to just get over her lose way to soon, the plot pushing him towards the stone faced detective instead. She found it stupid. 

It didn't remind her of how she stoped thinking of Kaede as soon as the script demanded her to—even resenting her for a murder she didn't even do—looking at a boy made of stars. It _didn't_.

Oh, and _god_. The second case did nothing but make her mad. Inbetween the blatant Transphobia, though, was a story of three kids with secrets, friends betraying each other without evening meaning too. As odd as it sounded, she found herself relating to the programmer. 

Maki hated being weak.

The rest of the plot was forgettable. The third case way to easy. It was nothing like _his_ case, spun from lies and made with stardust, a press crushing him as if he was just a bug underfoot. She didn't hate him, as odd as that was to say. Maybe she did at one point, the script puppeting her movements as she played right into the masterminds hands, but now all she felt was a void laced with pity. 

She stopped watching after that.

 

VI.

She tried to grow a garden, once. The seeds sprouted, for a bit, green peaking out of the dirt. When she watched danganronpa, she was so caught up in it she forgot to water them before shutting herself up in the bathroom. 

Maki really didn't know what the world was thinking.

**Author's Note:**

> Drv3 owes me fifty buck for not delivering on the kaemaki interactions they promised with that promo art


End file.
